I'm so tempted to say thatunless I get enough reviews I won't update this - or better yet, I won't update 'An Object Lesson', but bitter experience has taught me that that generally doesn't work, so I might not.
Mind you, I said MIGHT. I might withold chapters, just to be cruel!
DISCLAIMER: I barely had the money to buy the book, let alone the rights to it. In other words, hell no, not mine.
After school, Alex walked back to his house in Chelsea, let himself in, and picked up some stuff from his room, that he thought he'd miss. He didn't take much – his iPod, some books and some History notes he'd left behind, but was almost undoubtedly going to need for his coursework.
He shoved them into his backpack, and cycled back to Wolf's flat – he'd worked out the route before. Brooklands was near enough to the street where Wolf lived to make having his bike, rather than taking the tube; and in any case, he needed to keep as fit as he could.
Alex had been right to predict that Wolf wouldn't be back, when he got in at about four fifteen. Shrugging, Alex took some money out of the drawer Wolf had pointed out earlier, and headed down to the Sainsbury's he'd passed on his way here.
He bought everything Wolf was missing in his fridge – bread, butter, milk – but focussed on frozen dinners, which he could take out in the morning before he went to school, and put in the microwave for both of them. As he wasn't sure when Wolf would eat (though Alex got the feeling that Wolf wasn't particularly picky – he just ate because he had to), he just got the cheapest things he could find. He didn't want the man complaining that Alex was too expensive. Even thought Wolf had made his dislike of Alex abundantly clear, Alex knew him, and trusted him, to a certain extent, and he didn't want to give the man a reason to chuck him out.
He bought two large boxes of cereal, and long life milk, three large blocks of butter, two of which he could freeze, and several loaves of bread, which could also be frozen. After that, came some cheap sandwich fillers, some fruit, and some fruit juice. He avoided fizzy drinks, as being over-expensive and unnecessary, then made his way over to the cleaning section.
Alex knew that Wolf had nothing in his flat to clean with, barring some rather old and pathetic looking wash-cloths, for cleaning the dishes, so he just bought everything – the cheapest things were Sainsbury's own make, so one of everything went in: wood polish, glass cleaner, some dusters, Hoover bags (Alex had checked the make of Hoover beforehand), Brasso, washing up liquid, dishwasher tablets – everything. Even down to toilet and shower cleaner.
He managed to buy everything for just under seventy pounds, which wasn't bad, considering the amount of stuff he'd bought. Restocking enough food for two people was expensive, and the cleaning products weren't overly cheap, either – and Alex had a whale of a time carrying it all back.
It was five o'clock by the time Alex got back to the flat. His hands had huge red lines in them from where the carrier bags had dug into them, and he had to shake them out to get the blood flowing again.
He put the food and the cleaning products away, but left out two of the frozen dinners to defrost, then sat down to do his homework. The cleaning could wait until tomorrow.
Alex finished his homework by six thirty, and, with nothing else to do, sat at his desk and daydreamed.
He remembered vividly being eight years old – it was before Jack had come to live with them as housekeeper – and Ian Rider not coming to pick him up from school. That was alright, Ian had explained to him what to do, and he gave him a new weekly tube ticket at the beginning of every week, but he had been worried when the man hadn't come home that night, hadn't been there to take him to school in the morning.
But then, Ian had done things like this sometimes, just as a test. When they'd been living in Barcelona, he'd made Alex do all the talking for a week, to get his Spanish perfect. When they'd been in Frankfurt, he'd dropped Alex off with some friends of his, and hadn't come back for a fortnight, just to make sure that Alex could survive on his own. Alex wasn't sure whether this was another of his uncle's tests, but, just in case it was, he wasn't going to fail it.
The real problem was, there was no food in the house. His uncle had taught him the basic premise of cooking when he was tiny, had had Alex help him with it from the moment the boy was old enough, but Alex wasn't entirely sure what to do without food. When one of the teachers at Brooklands had asked where his packed lunch was, he'd scuffed his foot against the floor, and muttered that he'd forgotten it.
By lunchtime the next day, however, Alex was starting to get desperate. He hadn't eaten for forty-eight hours, and he was starving – and starting to realise, too, that his uncle probably wasn't coming back any time soon.
He knew his uncle left money in the house for him, in case of emergency, but he wasn't really sure whether this counted as an emergency or not.
By the time he got home, however, Alex was so hungry, he threw caution to the winds, and decided that it was. Almost shyly, he had got the money from the drawer, and counted out twenty pounds, which, to his eight year old mind, seemed like an awful lot of money.
He had only bought basic things, bread and butter, fruit and some bottled water, nothing extravagant – and he had been so small, the woman on the till had had to crane over it to see him. By the time Ian Rider reappeared a week later, Alex was getting almost blasé about the shopping trips, and he had definitely learnt some lessons about self-sufficiency which he would never forget, but it had been his uncle's words on seeing him which left to most lasting impression.
"Oh god, Alex. I forgot about you."
Alex had swallowed his shock and disappointment, and said, quietly, "Would you like a sandwich?"
Ian had often disappeared without warning after that, and Alex had learnt to get used to it. He had come to terms with the fact that his uncle's job meant rather more to the man than he, Alex, did. And he had learnt to be self-sufficient. Until Jack arrived, when Alex was eleven, the boy had been looking after the house almost single-handedly, and it had been a bit of a shock to find that cleaning and shopping and cooking weren't his job anymore.
He had never mentioned it to Jack; he'd pretended (as he suspected his uncle did) that someone had come in every day to shop and cook and clean for them. Alex knew, now, that he could look after himself, and it gave him that extra courage sometimes – but, occasionally, when he thought about it, it was with the painful twinge of an abandoned eight-year-old, buried at the back of his mind.
By eight, Alex had accepted that James wasn't going to be home for a while yet, and he cooked one of the frozen dinners for himself, and left instructions for his 'guardian' as to what to do with the other. He rang Jack, briefly, to tell her that everything was OK – he lied, and said that his guardian was busy, and couldn't talk to her. When pressed, he told her that James was 'cooking', and, when she replied, he could hear her smile in her voice.
"He sounds like he's really taking care of you."
Alex looked round the empty flat, and swallowed, "Yeah. He's doing a really good job." He lied, quietly. He didn't want Jack to worry about him.
Alex went to bed at ten, and lay awake, until, an hour later, he heard the door snap shut, and Wolf walk in. He heard a surprised exclamation, and then, a few minutes later, the 'ping!' of a microwave door shutting. Footsteps came towards his door – he rolled over, and took long, steady, slow breaths. When the light fell onto his bed, he heard the man sigh, and walk away. Then he turned his iPod on, and went to sleep to the comforting sound of familiar music.
Wolf had already left, again, when Alex woke the next morning. It was Friday, Alex knew, and he wondered whether he should look forward to the weekend – or dread it.
"So…" Tom said, falling into step beside Alex as they made their way to Maths. "How's your care worker?"
"Good, thanks." Alex said, shrugging. "How are your parents?"
"Probably just as good as your care worker." Tom said, bitterly. "Fighting left, right and centre. My dad threw a mug at me last night. My mum told him not to break the crockery." He looked at Alex, sombrely. "I tell you, I'll be glad when this divorce is over and done with. But until it is, I may go and live with my brother in Italy."
Alex gave him a sympathetic, if awkward, pat on the shoulder. He would have liked to be able to offload his own home difficulties as easily as Tom did – hell, he would have liked to be able to confide anything as easily as Tom did – but he had taught himself to keep quiet for as long as he could remember, and he knew that even if he opened his mouth to tell him, the words would stick in his throat.
Alex was back at the flat at four that afternoon, having not had to make a detour into Chelsea; remembering that Wolf hadn't been home for hours the night before, and that he probably wouldn't be home till even later tonight, seeing as it was a Friday night, he decided that he had enough time to clean the flat before he got home.
He supposed that he could have gone to the cinema with a friend (and, despite the fact that he was rarely ever there, Alex did have friends at school other than Tom), or done something else that was rather more normal, but he was going to have to live in this flat for the next two weeks, and he would prefer it not to be quite so filthy.
Alex started in the bathroom, where the white enamel was almost black with dirt, except where the water hit it. It took some concentrated scrubbing to get the dirt out of the bath, as it did with the shower – especially the shower, in fact, seeing as it had walls which needed to be cleaned as well. He took out all the bath mats for washing, as they were also dark with dust, then scrubbed out the toilet, and stored the sink and toilet cleaners under the sink. He wiped the other surfaces down with a cloth, hoovered the floor, and gave in a wipe with the mop.
Standing back, he couldn't help but be rather proud of himself. Saving the world, Alex reflected, as he moved onto the next area to clean (the kitchen) brought a certain amount of pride. Cleaning something brought a sense of accomplishment.
He went over the rest of the flat in a couple of hours, though he avoided Wolf's room like the plague. No way was he going in there – Wolf would probably eat him if he even tried.
By the time he'd finished, the flat looked completely different, and Alex felt that same sense of accomplishment, even if it was muted by tiredness.
It was a quarter to eleven, Alex noted wearily, as he ate the frozen dinner he had taken out to defrost that morning. Wolf had probably gone out somewhere, and Alex couldn't blame him, though it was a little weird, the fact that they were living under the same roof, but never saw each other.
He had a shower, hung his towel neatly over the towel rail, and went t bed. He didn't hear James come in, which turned out to be a big problem the next morning.
It was Saturday, so Alex hadn't bothered to switch the alarm on – his boss had allowed him to skip this Saturday, because he had 'family trouble', so he didn't have to be up early for his job. That didn't stop him from waking up at nine o'clock. Unthinking, he didn't bother to get dressed, but stumbled through to the kitchen, to pour himself a glass of orange juice.
Then he froze, at the sight of a shirtless Wolf and a woman dressed in a pair of Wolf's boxers, and an extremely tight strappy top (without benefit of bra), sitting at the kitchen table.
"Oh my god." He muttered, totally unable to move, rooted to the spot with embarrassment, and becoming more and more embarrassed as he stood there.
Two pairs of eyes flew up at him, and Wolf looked thunderstruck.
"Oh shit." He muttered. Apparently, Ian Rider wasn't the only person to forget Alex.
"I'm sorry." Alex apologised, hastily, to the woman "I'll… um… I'm just, er… going. Sorry…"
The woman looked at him, and gave him a tiny, unfriendly lip-smile. "Is he yours?" she asked Wolf, frigidly.
"Him?" Wolf said, jocularly, giving Alex a glare that said 'go, now!' more emphatically than words, "No, of course not. Nah, I'm just doing a favour for Child Services. I told you I worked for the government, didn't I?"
"Oh, yeah…" she purred, leaning towards him. Alex fled, as her words floated after him. "You're so good…"
He gave them an hour and a half, while he did his homework, then he dressed, and practically ran out the door, pausing only to grab his keys, and pull a frozen dinner out the freezer.
He went over to Tom's house, in absence of anywhere else to go. Tom opened the door, and brightened on seeing Alex. In the background, Alex could hear shouting.
"Hey, Alex. D'you want to go somewhere. Umm… like, now? Because my house is a bit unsafe at the moment. I mean, you're welcome to stay, if you'd like, but…"
"Let's go." Alex interrupted him, quickly. "Anywhere. I don't care where – but I don't want to be here right now."
"Sure." Tom grinned, relieved. "We'll walk to the Tube, OK? You can leave your bike here."
They settled on a Starbucks, where Alex wolfed down a blueberry muffin like he'd never seen food before, while Tom stared in consternation.
"Is your SAS guardian not feeding you or something?" he asked, a faint tinge of worry in his voice that warmed Alex no end. "What has he done, put a minefield between you and the fridge?"
"I didn't get a chance to eat breakfast this morning, is all." Alex shrugged, and explained the situation he'd walked in on this morning. Tom whistled.
"Shit. Nice one, Alex."
"How was I supposed to know that he was going to have a woman there?" Alex protested. "I mean, I didn't know!"
"No, I know. But… shit! So, is he a good guardian, or whatever? Can I come and camp at your place?" This last was said with a hopeful smile. Alex sighed, shredding the paper cup his muffin had come in, and not meeting Tom's eye.
"I haven't really seen him all that much. This morning was the first time I've spoken to him since Wednesday."
"So – that's a no, then?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"You've got some of the worst luck in the world, Al, you know that, right?"
"It'd be a little hard to miss. What with all the people trying to kill me, I mean."
"Yeah, I guess that would get your attention." Tom grinned.
They stayed out until six o'clock that evening, when Tom said, reluctantly, that he'd have to go home.
'Not that they'd notice I wasn't there.' He said, quietly, 'Just I don't want to risk them possibly noticing, and then dragging me into their arguments, having mum say that Dad drove me out of the house, and dad saying the same thing about her.'
Alex went back with him to get his bike, and, when Tom asked him to, he agreed to go in with him, just to provide 'moral support' while his friend told his parents that he was home.
"Hey, mum, dad, I'm back…" he said, going into the kitchen. Alex followed him. Tom's voice had made both of his parents look towards him, and the piece of plate his mother had been about to throw went off course, and was flying towards Alex.
As it happened, it lost height as it went, as she had only been intending to smash it on the floor, not throw it at her husband, but the sharp edge still sliced across the back of Alex's wrist.
No one noticed Alex's sharp intake of breath, not even Tom, and Alex didn't want to fan the flames of the already-volatile household, so he kept quiet about it. He said goodbye to Tom, and kept his bleeding arm firmly out of view.
Alex had been hoping that James would be out when he got in, as he had been before, to give himself a chance to bandage his wrist up without the man noticing. He knew that, so long as it wasn't bleeding, he could hide it from his guardian – but he had no such luck. As soon as he shut the front door of the flat, Wolf appeared in the doorway to the living room.
"Look, Alex, about this…shit, what happened to your arm?" The man hurried over to him, and picked up his hand, to get a better look at it. "It's nasty." He said, shortly. "How d'you do it?"
Alex considered lying, and considered just not answering. In the end though, he just couldn't be bothered to make up a lie. "My best friend's mum through a bit of plate at me." He said, tiredly. "It's nothing."
Wolf was already running the cold water. "Put your wrist under this." He ordered, while he hunted through the cupboards to find the plasters.
"They're in the cupboard above the microwave." Alex told him, referring to the plasters. "And I thought you were no good at first aid?"
"On myself." Wolf clarified, getting out the plasters. "On others, it's OK."
He bandaged up Alex's arm, neatly, and then said, seriously. "I'm sorry about this morning. That was Gloria. My girlfriend."
"She looked nice." Alex offered, weakly, not entirely sure what to say.
"She is. I'll warn you next time she's going to come round."
"How? We never see each other." Alex pointed out.
"Yeah, about that…" Wolf shifted, rather uncomfortably. "Look, I'm going to be around more next week. Thanks for doing the shopping, and the cleaning, by the way. Oh, and Michael's coming round tomorrow. He said he wants to make sure that you're OK. Um… are you?"
"Yeah." Alex nodded, almost as awkward as James. "Yeah, I'm OK. Thank you." He couldn't think of anything else to say, so he gave him an awkward smile, and moved away from him, out of the kitchen and into his room.
Alex reflected, that night before he fell asleep, that facing down world-renowned criminals was far easier than knowing what to say to the man who was 'looking after' you – and obviously didn't want to.
Ahah! And, we're done for another chapter. It's a bit boring now, I grant you, but I promise, it will getmore interesting. I have big plans for this fic.Now,to thank my reviewers.
soaringeagle: thanks. I'm desperately trying to get the two of them to bond, but Wolf's being awkward, damn him. Still, I'll have managed it soon enough.LOL!
fghj: To be honest, I'm not sure whether there'll be any global trouble, though I'm being pretty flexible about what goes in and hat doesn't. I know the basic outline of the story, and where I want the characters to go, but as to how they get there, I'm not sure. Still, I'm glad you liked it!
Audrey G. Black: Thanks! I'm ever so slightly in love with Wolf too... and he's gonna play a massive part in this!
Alexi.Locke: Don't worry, there'll DEFINITELY be more. Thanks for saying I write well, that's really nice of you, all us 'authors' like to hear it! ;-) And, like I said, Wolf is a favourite of mine, too, and he's definitely gonna play a huge part in this 'ere story.
LAlaRACOON: I've updated as soon as I can, hope you like!
musicsage: I'm glad you like the characterization - it does tend to get a little off here, doesn't it? I'm afraid they are going to change, and Alex may seem a little OOC later on, but I'm trying my hardest not to make him seem as self-sufficient as he does in the actual books, because it doesn't fit for where I want this to go. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it's the only thing that works. Don't worry, though- he's still gonna kick some ass later on. (is it Freudian that I originally wrote 'kiss some ass'!)
Eagle's daughter: I'm glad you like it - and thanks for reassuring me about my Spanish! (I'm kicking myself about the 'mio', though - I've just taken my GCSE in Spanish, and I have this sneaking suspicion I wrote 'mio'. Damn. It's all my brothers fault - he's learning ITalian at the moment...) To be honest, I don't think Wolf really notices how clean or dirty the house is! Thanks for your review!
Sabhaircin: Aww, thank you! I'll update as quick as I can!
Boo26: You are absolutely wonderful, and if I could, I would kiss you. Sorry, but your review gave me a wonderful idea - involving parent meetings, Wolf, and Michael desperately trying to reign him in, and make him just a little bit less aggressive... Thank you! Consider yourself metaphorically kissed. ;-) In a completely platonic way, you understand! Oh, and thank you so much for saying you liked it!
rocks and glass: I thought the concept was amusing too - I know I didn't write it to be funny, but I write it grinning. For me, it's something about the idea of Wolf being forced to be a parent, and REALLY having no idea what he's doing. For you, it may just be my appalling writing (seeing as you specifically said you though I wrote well in your review, that becomes extremely obvious as a fish for compliments. Oh well. What can I say? I'm a high-upkeep sorta girl...)
writing-chick: Thanks - I will do next time, though I'm trying to practice my Spanish, cos I'm taking it to A-level... shakes
Missmelissa4251: Yeah, he has a really uncomfortable house doesn't he? Just the thing to make a fourteen year old feel at home. Well, Alex'll have to help him out, I guess... Thanks for your reviews, they're always lovely!
cutecess: Thanks for the grammar tip, I didn't know that! And thanks for your lovely review, too, it made me smile. A lot. No, the books don't say Wolf's Spanish, but they say he speaks with a slight accent, so I just made him spanish. If I'd been sensible, I'd have made him french, seeing as my french is (marginally) better than my Spanish, but oh well. I'm glad you like this! (on the other hand, have you ever tried typing a story about a guy called 'Wolf' with a computer that's missing a 'w' key? My advice is: don't. LOL!)
Eternal Rhapsody: I really can't remember whether I've said this before or not, but I love your name. It's so cool! Anyway, thanks for your review, it was really nice. Here's the more you wanted!
Well, I'm finished here. Lol, ami xxx
